Windows 10's Edge vs Chrome: We're Faster and Win in Battery Face-off, Says Microsoft (zdnet.com)

Microsoft has kicked off 2018 with two new ads promoting Windows 10 Edge's battery efficiency and speed compared with Google Chrome. From a report: Microsoft published the two new ads on New Year's Eve, pitting Edge against Chrome, the world's most popular browser. "Microsoft Edge is up to 48 percent faster than Google Chrome," Microsoft says in one of the 30-second ads. Not only that, but Microsoft argues that Edge is safer too, thanks to SmartScreen, its built-in equivalent of Google's Safe Browsing anti-phishing technology. Microsoft says: "Edge blocks 18 percent more phishing sites than Google Chrome." Microsoft doesn't cite the source of this statistic, but in October, NSS Labs released a report comparing Edge on the locked-down Windows 10 S with Chrome on Chromebooks, suggesting that Edge blocks more phishing URLs than Chrome.

Comments

It's not terrible...

[rwven]

Edge is OK. Where I think it lacks, in the same way that the latest Firefox lacks, is in its integration support, mobile features, and plugins.

I use Google services a lot, and the fact that Chrome has native sign-in to Google, makes the integration really clean. Also the plugins on Chrome tend to be a lot more mature and stable than those for the "lesser" browsers. That's less of an issue with FF, but it's still present.

Edge IS quite fast, and does a good job with proper page rendering.

I think the problem is that Chrome is just a great browser. It doesn't matter if Edge is "just as great," or even "a little greater in this one area." A ton of people are embedded with Chrome now, and unless there's a REAL incentive to change, why would they?

Battery claim is for when Edge isn't running

[raymorris]

Last I checked, Microsoft's battery claim is for sitting there watching a video, without the browser actually doing anything at all.

Re:Battery claim is for when Edge isn't running

[Mr.Radar]

They definitely seem to have heavily optimized for the video playback use-case. On my slow (but cheap) Atom-based notebook video playback is noticeably smoother and uses less CPU than Firefox even though Edge is noticeably slower at actual web rendering.

I disagree.

[pecosdave]

I added a second HDD to my work laptop and decided it was time to reinstall Windows yesterday.

Edge is nearly all together broken. Nearly every page I load gives me a disconnected / time out type error. I could bring up the Brave website this morning, but I couldn't actually download brave using Edge.

That's right - I started Internet Explorer to download another browser because Edge wasn't up to the task.

It took me nearly an hour to log in, download, and install Office 365 yesterday using Edge as my on-ramp.

I don't know what the hell is going on with Edge, but the rest of the system is working fine. Once I got Brave installed I was able to cruise the web just fine. For the purposes of this post I started up Edge on my Windows laptop to see if it's working. I was able to load Slashdot, it took a lot longer than Brave does.

The only thing out of the ordinary about this laptop is I syspreped it, I left the factory SSD as most everything and I put \users on a 2 TB hybrid drive. Literally Edge is the only problem I've had since doing the install yesterday.

That one annoying bug

[Touvan]

IE and now Edge have one annoying UI quirk - immediately after you start it, you can click into the address bar, then it almost always takes away focus for some damned reason (actually, Windows does this all over the place - it's the primary reason I can't use that OS).

If they'd fixed this one problem, I'd probably use it more. I suspect they don't use their own software at Microsoft. They'd surely have noticed and fixed it by now if they did...

Microsoft cheats when it comes to Edge performance

[acroyear]

When Chrome is running, Windows continues to run background processes like system updates.

When Edge is running instead, I noticed the CPU and network usage of those background processes to drop to near 0.

This is the exact same type of b.s. that got them sued by the DOJ 23 years ago.

Sick of the "Edge is better" campaign

[robvdl]

I had my first experience setting up Windows 10 the other day for a friend, I had been avoiding it all this time. Anyway the experience was horrible, first of all during the install Cortana starts talking to me, WTF? I don't like talking to AI's especially during setup when I didn't even turn Cortana on, so turn it off as soon as I can but it still seemed to be "listening" and picked up dialog from the TV going in the background and started selecting the wrong language setting because of the TV, what's up with that? Also during the install it has a whole page full of privacy settings, asking me if it's OK to spy on me basically, I untick everything off course. Next thing is I go to download Chrome using Edge. I think I got told about 2 or 3 times that I shouldn't be using Chrome because Edge is "better", that experience left a sour taste in my mouth. Also I mostly dislike Edge because I am a web developer and know just how bad IE was at web standards over the last decade, so no thanks, I am not using Edge. Anyway, first of all the Bing search results say something along the lines that Edge is better on Windows 10 than Chrome and that I should continue using it, I ignore it and install it anyway. Then I start Chrome and it recommends me to go to settings so I can change the default browser. I went to settings, it sat on 100% CPU for about 30 minutes, after FINALLY getting in there and changing the default browser it STILL tells me I shouldn't be changing the default browser because "Edge is better". I was quite annoyed at the whole process and constantly getting told by Microsoft not to install Chrome.

If only speed was the primary factor

[Ngarrang]

If speed was the most important factor for choosing software, I would be running Linux instead of Windows 10.